Working at Shell's Deepwater division in New Orleans gives Barbara Waelde a front-row seat to how the right data can unlock crucial information for the oil giant. So when her supervisor asked her last year if she was interested in a program that could sharpen her digital and data science capabilities, Waelde, 55, jumped at the chance. Since she began her online coursework, the seven-year Shell veteran has learned Python programming, supervised learning algorithms and data modeling, among other skills. Shell began making these online courses available to U.S. employees long before COVID-19 upended daily life. And according to the oil giant, there are no plans to halt or cancel any of them, despite the fact that on March 23 it announced plans to slash operating costs by $9 billion.

Princeton mathematician John Conway has died of the coronavirus. He was 82 years old. The British-born Conway spent the early part of his career at Cambridge before moving to Princeton University in the 1980s. He made contributions in various areas of mathematics but is best known for his invention of Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton in which simple rules give rise to surprisingly complex behaviors. It was made famous by a 1970 Scientific American article and has had a lively community around it ever since then.

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In a major about-face in public health policy, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, and state and local health officials around the country recently began urging people to wear homemade face masks when they're out in public. The directive is not meant to replace social distancing, but to reduce the spread of infection and ensure the most effective personal protective equipment goes to health care workers on the front line. But it could also throw a wrench in a number of facial recognition applications, including those used to unlock smartphones. Less than a year old, Google's facial recognition system on Pixel 4 smartphones is built to recognize a person even if they've shaved their beard or are wearing sunglasses, but Face Unlock for Pixel 4 is rendered virtually useless by homemade face masks. A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat that Face Unlock isn't made to recognize people wearing face masks and declined to say whether the company is working to add that capability to its system.

In many patients with diabetes, early signs leading to diagnosis include abnormal levels of glucose, increased urinary excretion, and higher food consumption. While those symptoms may be able to determine likelihood of diabetes diagnosis, machine learning could be the most capable way of accurately predicting future onset of diabetes, a new study has found. As published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, a research team utilized a form of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, which comprises of computerized algorithms learning and adapting to new patterns when exposed to fresh data. For the study, over 500,000 medical records from more than 130,000 patients were analyzed by the research team, 65,505 of which were regarded as having no prior history of diabetes. The records, dated 2008 through 2018, were based in a populated region of Japan.

The grant will reshape current forecasting methods and will allow the team to develop an open-source, modular, and flexible tool that uses epidemic case incidence data to inform short-term case and epidemic risk projections. It builds on the "Mapping the Risk of International Infectious Disease Spread (MRIIDS)" prototype that the team developed with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Project partners will apply natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to automate the extraction of epidemic case data and will further refine and improve forecasting algorithms through use of artificial intelligence. Integration of other innovative data streams will strengthen the accuracy and validity of these predictive models for impending outbreaks.

My friend Robert John, professor of computer science at the University of Nottingham, who has died of liver cancer aged 64, pioneered the use of "type-2 fuzzy sets" in computational intelligence, to establish ways of reasoning algorithmically about linguistic concepts that involve uncertainty – something humans are good at, but computers are not. In the 1990s, while Rob (as he was known to family, though called Bob by work colleagues) was working at De Montfort University, he became involved in research into solving a community transport scheduling problem using fuzzy logic. Working from the foundations laid by Prof Lotfi Zadeh, Rob, through his PhD in 2000 and subsequent work with Prof Jerry Mendel and others, developed the mathematical techniques to use type-2 fuzzy sets. Two papers on type-2 and interval type-2 that he wrote with Mendel are among the most frequently cited and influential in the world on the topic. Rob was a founder member in 1995 of the Centre for Computational Intelligence at De Montfort and led its growth through the 2000s, established his reputation in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' conferences and in journals on fuzzy logic, and was promoted over time to deputy dean.

At supermarkets like Giant Eagle, robots are freeing up employees who previously spent time taking inventory to focus on disinfecting and sanitizing surfaces and processing deliveries to keep shelves stocked. Retailers insist the robots are augmenting the work of employees, not replacing them. But as the panic buying ebbs and sales decline in the recession that is expected to follow, companies that reassigned workers during the crisis may no longer have a need for them. The role of a cashier is also changing. For many years, retailers have provided self-checkout kiosks.

For our February AI Ethics Twitter Chat, we invited expert guest, Dr. Brandie Nonnecke, Founding Director, Citris Policy Lab at UC Berkeley to discuss "Deconstructing Deepfakes". Mia Dand: Dr. Nonnecke, Let's start off with the basics, what are deepfakes? Dr. Brandie Nonnecke: "Deepfakes" are deceptive audio or visual media created with AI to depict real people saying or doing things they did not. The term "deepfake" is a portmanteau of "deep learning" (a type of machine learning) & "fake". Don't confuse deepfakes w/ "cheap fakes" or "shallow fakes", which are created w/out AI.

Researchers behind an AI app that detects coronavirus in your voice have asked for volunteers to help by uploading audio of them coughing, breathing, and talking. Scientists from Cambridge University will use the data to develop machine learning algorithms that analyze a voice for symptoms of COVID-19. The COVID-19 Sounds App joins a growing list of tools using voice analysis to diagnose the coronavirus. The method remains unproven, but the team believes the sounds made by COVD-19 patients are so specific that they can reveal who has the disease. "Having spoken to doctors, one of the most common things they have noticed about patients with the virus is the way they catch their breath when they're speaking, as well as a dry cough, and the intervals of their breathing patterns," said Cambridge University Professor Cecilia Mascolo, who led the development of the app.